New Moon - Stephenie Meyer [82]
I stopped in front of Jacob’s house, killing the motor and rolling down the windows. It was stuffy today, no breeze. I put my feet up on the dashboard and settled in to wait.
A movement flashed in my peripheral vision—I turned and spotted Billy looking at me through the front window with a confused expression. I waved once and smiled a tight smile, but stayed where I was.
His eyes narrowed; he let the curtain fall across the glass.
I was prepared to stay as long as it took, but I wished I had something to do. I dug up a pen out of the bottom of my backpack, and an old test. I started to doodle on the back of the scrap.
I’d only had time to scrawl one row of diamonds when there was a sharp tap against my door.
I jumped, looking up, expecting Billy.
“What are you doing here, Bella?” Jacob growled.
I stared at him in blank astonishment.
Jacob had changed radically in the last weeks since I’d seen him. The first thing I noticed was his hair—his beautiful hair was all gone, cropped quite short, covering his head with an inky gloss like black satin. The planes of his face seemed to have hardened subtly, tightened...aged. His neck and his shoulders were different, too, thicker somehow. His hands, where they gripped the window frame, looked enormous, with the tendons and veins more prominent under the russet skin. But the physical changes were insignificant.
It was his expression that made him almost completely unrecognizable. The open, friendly smile was gone like the hair, the warmth in his dark eyes altered to a brooding resentment that was instantly disturbing. There was a darkness in Jacob now. Like my sun had imploded.
“Jacob?” I whispered.
He just stared at me, his eyes tense and angry.
I realized we weren’t alone. Behind him stood four others; all tall and russet-skinned, black hair chopped short just like Jacob’s. They could have been brothers—I couldn’t even pick Embry out of the group. The resemblance was only intensified by the strikingly similar hostility in every pair of eyes.
Every pair but one. The oldest by several years, Sam stood in the very back, his face serene and sure. I had to swallow back the bile that rose in my throat. I wanted to take a swing at him. No, I wanted to do more than that. More than anything, I wanted to be fierce and deadly, someone no one would dare mess with. Someone who would scare Sam Uley silly.
I wanted to be a vampire.
The violent desire caught me off guard and knocked the wind out of me. It was the most forbidden of all wishes—even when I only wished it for a malicious reason like this, to gain an advantage over an enemy—because it was the most painful. That future was lost to me forever, had never really been within my grasp. I scrambled to gain control of myself while the hole in my chest ached hollowly.
“What do you want?” Jacob demanded, his expression growing more resentful as he watched the play of emotion across my face.
“I want to talk to you,” I said in a weak voice. I tried to focus, but I was still reeling against the escape of my taboo dream.
“Go ahead,” he hissed through his teeth. His glare was vicious. I’d never seen him look at anyone like that, least of all me. It hurt with a surprising intensity—a physical pain, a stabbing in my head.
“Alone!” I hissed, and my voice was stronger.
He looked behind him, and I knew where his eyes would go. Every one of them was turned for Sam’s reaction.
Sam nodded once, his face unperturbed. He made a brief comment in an unfamiliar, liquid language—I could only be positive that it wasn’t French or Spanish, but I guessed that it was Quileute. He turned and walked into Jacob’s house. The others, Paul, Jared, and Embry, I assumed, followed him in.
“Okay.” Jacob seemed a bit less furious when the others were gone. His face was a little calmer, but also more hopeless. His mouth seemed permanently pulled down at the corners.
I took a deep breath. “You know what I want to know.”
He didn’t answer. He just stared at me bitterly.
I stared back and